Anti-abortion activist Merrie Turner (R) gives Mick Krieger, chief of staff for House Minority Leader John Boeher (R-OH), a plastic fetus during a meeting in the Longworth House Office Building on Capitol Hill November 5, 2010 in Washington, DC. November 4, 2010 - Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images South AmericaLife Before Liberty | Patriarch John Boehner Moves Against American Women AOC Smart Sensuality Women

X-posted on AOC FP and SN FP

1. A House panel in Iowa has approved a measure that would ban all abortions in Iowa. Backers of the measure approved today say it defines life as beginning at the moment of conception and would protect it from that point.

Opponents of the bill say that it will prohibit many forms of contraception. As Cynthia Tucker write this weekend for the Atlanta Constitution:

Nearly half the pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and about four in ten of those unintended pregnancies result in abortions, according to the highly respected Guttmacher Institute, a non-profit dedicated to reproductive health and improved family planning. It stands to reason, then, that helping women to gain access to reliable contraceptives and to use them appropriately would reduce unintended pregnancies and abortions.

It’s no mystery why abortion rates are much lower in Western Europe. Those countries have adopted public policies that make birth control pills and other contraceptives cheap and widely available. If we did the same, abortion rates would drop sharply here, as well.

We are so concerned by state legislatures legislating when life begins, that one of our enthusiastic readers Lisa Catherine Brown has come forward, willing to write regularly for AOC on the proliferation of laws being promoted to take away women’s rights.

Within days, the House of Representatives will vote to take away any federal funding that supports centers involved with birth control — such as Planned Parenthood — with implications also on any American aid to women in poor countries.

Lisa is a happily-married mother of four in Michigan whose first article for AOC is Life Before Liberty | Patriarch John Boehner Moves Against American Women.

To underscore the impact of the ultra-Conservative Tea Party crowd on Republicans, we remind readers that it was five Republican Supreme Court justices who voted for a pro-choice, pro-woman right to legal abortion in America.

Five Republican Men Who Gave American Women the Right to Choose Motherhood AOC Smart Sensuality Women

The BBC reports that in Britain, a legal bid to allow women taking medication to induce abortion to receive both sets of pills at the same time has been rejected by the High Court.

The British Department of Health opposed the change, which affected England, Scotland and Wales. Abortion remains illegal in Ireland.

The pills are available to 70,000 women seeking abortion in the first nine weeks of pregnancy. The proposed change would have brought British law into accord with the rest of Europe.

BPAS chief executive Ann Furedi said the charity would continue to press for a change in the law.

“It cannot be morally right to compel a woman to physically take tablets in a clinic and to subject her to the anxiety that symptoms will start on the journey back when her doctor knows it is safe and indeed preferable for her to take these at home.” via BBC

In an earlier January 2011 article Early medical abortions: bid to change the law, a British mother shared her story:

My 18-year-old daughter had the early medical abortion at six weeks of pregnancy. We had to travel two hours away to hospital for each pill. The second pill day was very traumatic, she had it late in the afternoon and was basically left to get on with it but not able to leave the hospital until 2200. We then had to travel home (complete with a road closure and very scary diversion) arriving at around 0100. It was a very stressful and it would have been much better for my daughter if she could have had both pills administered either at our local surgery or hospital and then sent home, or given to her to be taken at home where she would have felt much more comfortable. Denise, Powys

On a lighter note — perhaps — we share new Private Studio editorials.